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Jelena Zdravkovic, Janis Stirna, Martin Henkel Department of Computer & Systems Sciences (DSV), Sorckholm University, Sweden

Jānis Grabis Information Technology Institute, Riga, Technical University, Latvia

Modeling Business Capabilities and Context Dependent Delivery by Cloud Services

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Outline

Problem

Capability and Other Key Concepts

Capability Meta-Model, Delivery in Cloud

Example Case

Capability Driven Development

Conclusion and Future Work

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Problem

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The Challenge • Changing business contexts

• Limited support for changes in non-

functional requirements

• Inability to model execution

contexts

• High cost of developing applications

for different contexts

• Gap between EM and MDD

• Limited cloud platform usage

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Capability and Other Key Concepts

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Key Concepts: Capability • In a business context, capability refers to the resources and

expertise that an enterprise needs to offer its functions. • Lately the notion of business capability has gained a growing

attention, due to a number of factors: it directs business investment focus, it can be used as a baseline for business planning, and it leads directly to service specification and design • Capability maps to IT deployments through IT architectures.

• The notions has been over time captured by Enterprise

Architecture, but neither in details modeled, nor formally linked to software services.

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Key Concepts: Context • The notion of context refers to situational cognition; as such, it

is used to describe the conditions of a situation. • “any information that can be used to characterize the situation

of an entity” Where, who, what... Location, identity, activity, time… Modalities of agent’s state in AOP…

• Existing context categorizations set the focus to an entity, or

more specifically, to a user. In contrast, in our research, there is a need to model the context surrounding the delivery of business.

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Key Concepts: Cloud • Cloud computing facilitates coherence of the resources and

economies of scale through its pay-per-use business model. • From the customer’s perspective the cloud technology offers a

means to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly, without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software.

• So far, scalability challenges have been mainly addressed by providing targeted technical solutions.

• Our approach starts by setting up business requirements for the cloud using capabilities and context.

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Key Relations

Enterprise and capability (Goal, KPI, Process)

Capability in context (Context, Context KPI)

Capability patterns (Process Variants, Resources)

Delivery in cloud (Cloud Models, Implementation)

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Capability Meta-Model

Capability Meta-Model, Delivery in Cloud

Context Framework and Measurable Properties

Context Category

Relevance Availability Feature Time Location

Subjects Organization Customers Partners Competitors

What is subject doing?

Is subject available?

Characteristic or quantity of subject

When does subject perform process?

Where is subject located?

Objects Infrastructure Artefact Service

How is object used?

Is object available?

Characteristic or quantity of object

When is object used?

Where is object located?

Environment Regulations Standards Weather

What is the influence of environment?

Is environment concept available?

Characteristic or quantity of environment

When is environment concept applicable?

Where is environment concept located?

Example Case

Example Case - Goals

Example Case – Capabilities • Strategic planning providing the building operator and other

stakeholders with decision support for investment planning based on historical data and scenarios for prices and weather.

• Operational planning in passive mode providing operational planning based on template based energy audit and human assisted or manual input of data into DSS and manual input of temperature set points for the next 24 hours into the system used for controlling.

• Operational planning in active mode providing operational planning based on full energy audit, and daily update of sensor data and automatic transfer of set-points into the BEMS using the BACnet/IP protocol.

Example Case – Context Context Set for Capability: Operational planning in passive mode

Context Type Relevance Availability Feature Time Location

Subjects Weather data provider

Provides weather data

Yes, as cloud service

Date of last update

Every day Not relevant

Pricing data provider

Provides pricing data

Yes, as cloud service

Date of last update

Every day Not relevant

Building operator

Update energy usage and weather data

Yes Not relevant Every 24 hours At the building or remotely

Objects BEMS For data input

and output No Not relevant Not relevant At the building site

Sensors For building environment and weather

No Sensor readings Every 15 min At the building site

Example Case – Delivery in Cloud? Payment process. Variants: pay-per-use, one-time fee. • For cloud delivery it is rational to let the users of the DSS to

pay a monthly or yearly fee, since the use of a cloud platform will incur cost for the provider.

• For a local installation it can be assumed the organization buying the service will provide own hardware, thus allowing a one-time fee.

• In the EnRiMa case it is likely that other services (e.g. energy audits) will be performed by the organization providing the DSS, thus this points toward using a flexible pay-per-use fee.

Example Case – Delivery in Cloud? Deployment and Update process. Variants: local installation scripts, upload in cloud. • The deployment of software to the cloud and locally can differ,

thus to support both cloud delivery and local installations there is a need to have separate process variants for each.

• Some cloud platform, such as Amazon EC2 IaaS service, support the upload of pre-configured virtual machines, while others, such as Google App Engine PaaS service requires the service components to have specific format compliant with the platform.

• In the EnRiMa DSS case the DSS user interface services component is developed in a format that is easily transferrable to Google App Engine PaaS.

Capability Driven Development

Capability Driven Development Environment

Cloud Service

Capability design tool

Enterprise architecture

Context platform

SaaS

IaaS

PaaS C

apab

ility

del

iver

y ap

plic

atio

n

KPI

Adjustment algorithms

Modeling module

Rep

osito

ry o

f pa

ttern

s

Composition module

Integration module

Conclusion and Future Work

Conclusion We have proposed to support the design of business capabilities by using enterprise modeling techniques as a starting point, and to employ model-based patterns to describe how the software application can adhere to changes in the execution context. -------------------- • The proposal has a strong business orientation. • It was our intention to give a contribution to a gap between

business requirements and mainly technical-driven solutions for the cloud.

• With the proposed approach business modelers will be able to plan the business requirements for the cloud using goals and KPIs in accordance to changing contexts.

• The solution has been driven by empirical requirements that we have experienced so far, in particular the presented EnRiMa project case.

Future Work: FP7 CaaS project

Future Work: FP7 CaaS project

Contact Info

Jelena Zdravkovic, jelenaz@dsv.su.se

Janis Stirna, js@dsv.su.se

Martin Henkel, martinh@dsv.su.se Department of Computer & Systems Sciences (DSV), Sorckholm University, Seden

Jānis Grabis, grabis@rtu.lv

Information Technology Institute, Riga, Technical University, Latvia